Wednesday, June 28, 2017

John Fotopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou, in their recent article "Women and the Creed: Who For Us Humans and for Our Salvation," (published by "Public Orthodoxy") have expressed their unhappiness that the Greek Archdiocese has decided to use a translation of the Creed that is in line with pretty much every other translation that English speaking Orthodox Christians have been using for as long as we have had Orthodox Christians speaking English. They are offended by the use of the word "man". Here is the line of the Creed in question,as it is usually translated:

"Who for us men and for our salvation came down from the heavens, and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary, and became man..."

And here is their suggested "improvement" to that translation:

"Who for us humans and for our salvation came down from heaven and was incarnate of the Holy Spirit and the Virgin Mary and became human..."

Aside from the fact that this sounds like a translation done by a Federation Starship's computer, it is simply ugly and unnecessary. It has long been said that the Greek Archdiocese has intentionally used the worst English translations possible, in hopes that people will just forget the whole thing, and keep using Greek. In this case, they are moving in the right direction. The folks at Public Orthodoxy, however, would have them opt for an even more ugly translation then they had previously ("Who for us and for our salvation...").

Their argument, in a nutshell, is as follows:

"...“men” is not the most accurate translation for the word ἀνθρώπους in contemporary English. Rather, translating ἀνθρώπους as “men” can be viewed, at best, as an expression of outdated English usage and, at worst, as an expression of gender exclusive English translation. There is no good reason to use outdated English in a new translation of the Creed or to use a gender exclusive English term when ἀνθρώπους is meant to be inclusive. The word ἄνθρωπος is the generic term for a human being in ancient Greek, while there are other terms for “man” and “woman.”

It is certainly true that "anthropos" is not a gender specific word in Greek, but "man" is also not a gender specific word in English -- it can be, as the usage has developed, but we still use it in its non-gender specific sense... all of the time.

The PO folks may not have noticed, but the offending word "man" is also found in the word "woman". That is because a woman is a particular variety of man. The word woman comes from the Old English 'wīfman" -- "a wife man." Males use to be referred to as "werman" (a male man) but gradually the first syllable dropped out of common use. So should we opt for "wo-person" over "woman"?

A friend of mine told me about an English professor he had in college (who was a woman) who insisted on using traditional words like "man" in the generic sense, and she had a young female student who objected. The professor responded: "If you were at the beach, and you were told that there was a man-eating shark in the water, would you go swimming? Because if you wouldn't, you're a hypocrite, because you understand full well that "man" refers generically to all human beings."

If someone accidentally killed a woman, and was charged with manslaughter, I doubt a defense that hinged on manslaughter laws applying only to male victims would go very far.

The word "man" goes very deep into the history of Indo-European languages. We find a form of it in Sanskrit: "manu", which has the same meaning. To purge English of the generic use of "man" you would have to deface a good bit more of the language than just that word "man" itself. Even the word "human" has the offending "man" root word. So should we opt for "hu-person"? Or perhaps we should just go with "hu", since the last three letters in "person" might offend those who want to neuter the language. While this might expand the possibilities for future versions of the old "Who's on first?" routine, it is all just silly, and nonsensical.

The translation proposed by PO is certainly defensible in terms of accuracy, but it is indefensible in terms of the aesthetics of the English language. The reason why the King James Version has stood the test of time, whereas no other modern translation has approached its beauty is because the translators of the KJV were not just accomplished biblical scholars, well versed in the pertinent languages they were translating from -- they also were well versed in the language they were translating the Bible into. They had a sense of the English language that few scholars today have -- and clearly John Fotopoulos and Aristotle Papanikolaou are not among those few, regardless of how well they no doubt grasp the original Greek.

If we followed their proposal here consistently, we would have to make the following changes to our translations of Scripture:

Instead of Pontius Pilate referring to the blooded and beaten Christ with the words "Behold the man!" (John 19:5) we would have him say "Behold the human!"

Instead of Christ saying: "The foxes have holes, and the birds of the air have nests; but the Son of man hath no where to lay his head" (Matthew 8:20), we would have him say "the Son of Human," or more loosely "The human being has no where to lay his head."

And instead of putting off the "old man" at baptism, and putting on the "new man" (Colossians 3:8-10), we would put off the "old human" and put on the "new human."

None of these steps would be an improvement to accuracy, and they certainly would not add to the beauty and majesty of the services in which they were read.

On the broader question of neutering the English language -- there are two major languages that have no gender distinctions at all, and so the two cultures associated with these languages should have been feminist utopias, if gender neutrality was the key to such a thing. The two languages I refer to are Turkish and Chinese. However, I think one could easily defend the argument that women in European cultures have been treated significantly better in the past two thousand years, despite them having to suffer the indignities of being forced to use languages that make gender distinctions. In fact, I think one would be hard pressed to find two literate cultures in which woman have historically been treated worse than that of the Turks and the Chinese -- and I say that as one who otherwise loves Chinese culture, but the way women were (and to a large extent, still are) treated is not the high point of Chinese civilization.

To this day, Chinese girls are often killed at birth, or aborted selectively before birth, because of a very low view of the value of women. When I was in college, I once worked in a Chinese restaurant, and one day I was asked about my family by an elderly Chinese woman who worked there. When I told her that I had four brothers, she said "Your momma have five boy? Oh, she very lucky!" But my mother had five boys because she wouldn't give up trying to have a girl, until having five boys had sufficiently worn her down. One woman came from a culture with perfect gender neutrality in their language, and the other didn't. Feminists somehow think that the culture with gender distinctions is the one that needs to be fixed. Go figure.

Update:

Giacomo Sanfilippo made a comment worth passing on in response to the article at Public Orthodoxy on Facebook: "To say that ἄνθρωπος is un-gendered strikes me as a bit simplistic, and requires nuance. Gen 2 (LXX) uses ἄνθρωπος interchangeably/synonymously with Adam, going so far as to say the ἄνθρωπος (not ἀνήρ) leaves father and mother to cling to his wife."

Christ Himself also quotes this passage (Genesis 2:24) in the Gospels (Matthew 19:5), and the Greek text uses "anthropos" to refer to a male who leaves father and mother and is joined to his wife.

Furthermore, in Matthew 10:35, Christ says: "For I am come to set a man [anthropos] at variance against his father, and the daughter against her mother, and the daughter in law against her mother in law."

James Latimir provides yet another example: "Consider 1 Esdras 9:40, where anthropos is used in clear opposition to gyne, as in, ‘men and women.’ (Jerome even translates anthropos in this case as vir!) That would make no sense if anthropos meant genderless ‘human’ (‘humans and women’: Public Orthodoxy are the real bigots! 😂), rather than inclusively masculine ‘man.’"

So clearly anthropos can be used to refer specifically to a male, just as the English word "man" can.

Monday, June 19, 2017

The misnamed blog Public Orthodoxy, which spends most of its efforts attacking the tradition of the Orthodox Church, recently published an article by Mark Arey, "Submission, Sexism, and Head Coverings," which attempts to undermine the Church's long established tradition of women covering their heads in Church. The article focuses its attention on 1 Corinthians 11:2-16, which provides the Scriptural basis for this tradition. What is most noteworthy about this article is that it does not cite a single Father of the Church to support any of its contentions regarding the practice in question -- which is of course because there are none that could have been cited for that purpose. But in addition to lacking in any support from the Fathers of the Church, the interpretations put forth by Mark Arey also have scant support from Protestant biblical scholarship.

Mark Arey's argument in this essay runs along these lines: He first argues that this passage is focused only on married women. Then he argues that when St. Paul speaks of the need for a woman to have "authority on her head because of the angels," that this actually means that a woman should have authority over her husband (whom St. Paul refers to as the head of the wife) in a sense analogous to the mutual authority that a husband and wife have over each other's bodies in marriage (1 Corinthians 7:3-4), and that it somehow pleases the angels to see the mutual balance in the equal relationship of the husband and wife. He further argues that St. Paul is not really requiring any women (married or not) to wear any kind of head covering, so long as they have long hair, which he argues is an alternative covering, according to his reading of this passage.

So lets take a closer look at the merits of his line of reasoning here..

Married Women, or All Women?

One thing that Mark Arey does here, is he translates the word "woman" (in Greek: γυνή gunē, from whence the word "gynecology" comes) as "wife", without any acknowledgment that this is a highly questionable choice in translation. Few translations do this, the ESV being one exceptional example, but most (the KJV, DRV, RSV, NRSV, NKJV, NIV, NASB, CEV, etc) do not. Anthony C. Thiselton, in his his rather exhaustive commentary on First Corinthians, acknowledges that the husband and wife relationship is a major aspect of the context of this passage, but states that this nevertheless "does not justify restricting the translation of γυνή to wife rather than woman (NRSV, NIV, REB, NJB) as if the emphasis were exclusive" (The New International Greek Testament Commentary: The First Epistle to the Corinthians (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmanns Publishing Company, 2000) p. 832).

Mark Arey cites an article which claims that it was Jewish custom for unmarried women to be unveiled, and so he again tries to advance the notion that head coverings were only obligatory for married women. However, whatever his intended point here might be, it is difficult to see how this argument squares with his subsequent argument that long hair can serve as a covering in place of a veil. If that is so, then is he arguing that unmarried women at the time had short hair until they got married? If all that St. Paul was concerned about here was that women have long hair, why mention head coverings at all? And is it really likely, that the problem in the Corinthian Church was a rash of women with butch haircuts? I am not aware of any published commentary of any significance that makes such a case.

Greco-Roman Cultural Norms, or Christian Standards?

It has often been argued that in this passage, St. Paul was simply demanding that women maintain the cultural norms of the time and place in which they were written, but the fact of the matter is that in Roman and Greek culture, it was not mandatory for women to have their heads covered in public or in religious services. Head coverings were certainly not unknown, but there was no cultural requirement for it. There is no evidence that only prostitutes in that culture went about with uncovered heads either. If you look at Greek and Roman statues and paintings of women, you find both covered and uncovered heads. It was not the cultural norms of the pagan Greeks or Romans that St. Paul was advancing, but rather the cultural norms of pious Old Testament Jewish custom that he was instructing Christian women everywhere to follow when praying or prophesying. It should also be noted that one should not assume that later Jewish customs prevailed in the first century, but rather look at the more contemporary evidence of that practice. For example, Tertullian, who was a North African Roman living in a culture very close in time and practice to that of St. Paul, noted that Jewish women were notable and stood out of the crowd because they so consistently covered their heads (De Corona, 4, see also Theological Dictionary of the New Testament, Volume 3, ed. Gerhard Kittel (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing, 1964-1976), p. 562f) -- and so the actual evidence points to this being a specifically Christian requirement, rooted in Jewish custom.

But how can we be sure that St. Paul really intended to say that this was something he expected of all Christian women, regardless of the cultural norms of their society? Well, for one thing, he brackets this passage with two appeals to the tradition of the Church. At the beginning, he says: "Now I praise you, brethren, that ye remember me in all things, and keep the traditions, as I delivered them to you." And at the end of this passage, addressing those who wish to do contrary to this tradition, he says in verse 16: "But if any man seem to be contentious, we have no such custom, neither do the churches of God." The universal practice of the Church (and even of those mainstream Christian groups outside of the Orthodox Church) prior to the Beatles appearing on the Ed Sullivan Show was for women to cover their heads in Church. I was raised in an Evangelical Protestant context, but I am old enough to remember the vestiges of this practice as a boy, even among the non-liturgical "holy-rollers" that I observed. And so we know that this is what St. Paul meant, because this is how two millennia of Christians have understood what he meant. It is only within living memory (i.e. post-sexual revolution) that this question has suddenly become a problem for some.

Furthermore, we can look at our iconographic tradition. It is extremely rare to see any icon that depicts a mature woman without a head covering. St. Mary of Egypt and our First mother Eve are the only examples that comes to mind to the contrary. In the case of St. Mary of Egypt, this is because the clothes that she wore into the desert rotted off of her, and she had only the tattered monastic cloak given to her by St. Zosima. In the case of Eve, she is depicted before fall in such a way as to convey the fact that she and her husband were "naked and unashamed." And then after the fall, she is shown with either the fig leaves she and Adam cobbled together, or the garments of skin given to her by the Lord. In both cases, their own stories require these depictions. Aside from that, if there are any other examples, they would be extremely rare, and probably aberrations from the general mainstream iconographic tradition.

Authority on the Head?

The King James provides a very literal translation of verse 10*:

"For this cause ought the woman to have power on her head because of the angels."

The word translated as "power" here (ἐξουσία) is usually taken to refer to the power of an authority. and most translations add some words to clarify the meaning. for example:

"For this cause ought the woman to have a sign of authority on her head because of the angels."

Mark Arey dismisses this, because the word "sign" or "symbol" is not there in the Greek. However, it is often the case when translating from one language to another that one has to supply some words that are not literally in the original in order to convey the actual sense of what the other words (which are in the original) actually mean in their particular arrangement in a given context.

And for Orthodox Christians, if we have any doubt about the meaning of a text like this, our first resort should be to the Fathers of the Church, and as Thiselton observes,

"most patristic commentators saw no problem in understanding ἐξουσία in an active sense as a metonymy for a sign of power over. Chrysostom observes: "Being covered is a mark of subjection and authority" [St. John Chrysostom, Homily 26:5 on First Corinthians], and Theophylact explicitly understands the metonymic sign of power. Ireneaus understands κάλυμμα [veil, Against Heresies 1:8:2] here" (Thiselton, p. 838).

To these three fathers, we could add the following examples:

"By authority he referred to the covering, as if to say, Let her show her subjection by covering herself, and not least for the sake of the angels, who are set over human beings and entrusted with their care" (Blessed Theodoret of Cyrus, Commentary on the Letters of St. Paul, Vol. 1, trans. Robert Charles Hill, (Brookline, MA: Holy Cross Orthodox Press, 2001), p. 205).

"The veil signifies power, and the angels are bishops, as it says in the Revelation of John, where, because they are men, they are criticized for not rebuking the people, though good behavior on their part is also praised" (Ancient Christian Texts: Commentaries on Romans and 1-2 Corinthians, Ambrosiaster, translated and edited by Gerald L. Bray (Downers Grove, IL: Intervasity Press, 2009) p. 143).p. 172

Furthermore, I think it is safe to say that no Church Father ever took this passage as if it referred to a wife having authority over her husband, because if any did, those who dispute the traditional practice of head coverings would have alerted us to such statements long ago.

We should also wonder why, if in fact St. Paul was affirming the equality of the wife with her husband in verse 10 that he would have felt the need to follow that verse with a statement that affirmed that very thing, but which begins with "Nevertheless" (πλήν):

"Nevertheless neither is the man without the woman, neither the woman without the man, in the Lord. For as the woman is of the man, even so is the man also by the woman; but all things of God" (1 Corinthians 11:11-2).

Clearly, these verses are meant to balance out what precedes it, which would be unnecessary if what precedes it said essentially the same thing. Thiselton, approvingly referencing the commentary of Gordon Fee, writes:

"Fee rightly observes, "With these two sets of sentences, in each of which woman and man are in balanced pairs, Paul qualified the preceding argument." The strong force of πλήν, nevertheless, confirms this" (Thiselton, p. 842, emphasis in the original).

There are some Protestant commentators that argue that what St. Paul is saying here is that a woman ought to keep power over her own head by wearing a veil and thus either protecting herself from others in public (through her modesty), or from fallen angels, or both; and some have argued that it was a sign a woman was empowered to prophesy (Thiselton, p. 837-841). However, no Protestant commentator of any significance, as best as I can tell, has ever attempted to put forth any interpretation remotely similar to that of Mark Arey.

The idea that a wife is in some respects under the authority of her husband does not require an affirmation that women are inferior to men, anymore than the fact that Christ submitted Himself to the will of His Father implies inequality in the Godhead. Commenting on the meaning of "head" (κεφαλή) in this passage, Thiselton notes:

"Chrysostom is highly sensitive to the multivalency of κεφαλή in 1 Cor 11:3. Chrysostom is aware that a parallel between men/women and God/Christ should not give "the heretics" grounds for a subordinationist Christology. In certain respects head denotes a kind of primacy, but both God and Christ on one side and men and women on the other are of the same mode of being. "For had Paul meant to speak of rule and subjection... he would not have brought forward the instance of a woman (or wife), but rather of a slave and a master.... It is a wife (or woman) as free, as equal in honor; and the Son also, though He did become obedient to the Father, it was as the Son of God; it was as God" [Homily 26:3 on First Corinthians]. ...Chrysostom (a) reflects Paul's notion that in the context of love between God and Christ, or between man and woman, obedience or response is chosen, not imposed; and (b) reflects the endeavor to do justice to the duality or wholeness of difference and "order" on the one side and reciprocity and mutual dignity and respect on the other" (Thiselton, p. 818f).

Mark Arey concludes his essay with the claim that St. Paul is not really concerned with any woman, married or not, actually wearing a head covering in Church, because St. Paul speaks of a woman's long hair as being a covering, This is an interpretation completely absent from the Fathers. You do find a tiny minority of Protestants that will make such arguments, but few serious scholars buy such arguments.

The point that St. Paul makes is that just as it is a shame for a woman to have her head shaved -- which was a punishment sometimes given to women of ill-repute, so is it a shame for a woman to not cover her head in Church. Any other reading of this passage makes everything that precedes this point meaningless.

It is especially difficult to see how St. Paul could have in his mind the notion that long hair is the covering he wants the woman to wear, when he says:

"For if the woman be not covered, let her also be shorn: but if it be a shame for a woman to be shorn or shaven, let her be covered.(1 Corinthians 11:6).

You would have to believe that he is arguing that if a woman has short hair, her hair should be cut short... which it already would be. Furthermore it is hard to imagine how a woman's hair could ever grow long again, if it was being cut, because it was short.

Conclusion

The more common argument that contemporary Protestants make, who try to to avoid the obvious intent of this passage, is to argue that St. Paul was simply addressing a culturally specific issue, and that the principle at work in this passage would only be that one should not use Christian liberty to flout cultural norms and gender distinctions. N. T. Wright, in his commentary on 1 Corinthians, evidently feels the weakness of this argument. After laying out all the reasons why it might be that this was a culturally specific question, he writes "That's a lot of 'perhaps'es" (Paul for Everyone: 1 Corinthians (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2003), p. 140). He then adds a few more 'perhaps'es, and then says:

"The trouble is, of course, that Paul doesn't say exactly this, and we run the risk of 'explaining' him in terms that might (perhaps) make sense to us while ignoring what he himself says" (Ibid, 141).

Perhaps, because N. T. Wright is a Protestant, we can cut him some slack for approaching this text in this way, and ignoring the history of the interpretation of this text in favor of one that comports to contemporary Protestant sensibilities, but Mark Arey should know better.

On what basis does Mark Arey present his novel interpretations as if they were the correct Orthodox understanding of this passage? Certainly not on the basis of the Fathers. Certainly not on the basis of how the Church has always understood this passage. And he can't really claim much of a basis for his readings of this text in Protestant biblical scholarship.

"Dost thou acknowledge that the Holy Scriptures must be accepted and interpreted in accordance with the belief which hath been handed down by the Holy Fathers, and which the Holy Orthodox Church, our Mother, hath always held and still doth hold?"

The correct answer to this question for a right believing Orthodox Christian is "I do," ...not, "I don't."

*The King James Version, while providing a very literal translation of this verse, also provided a margin note that says: "That is, a covering, to sign that she is under the power of her husband."

Friday, June 09, 2017

Before getting into the question of how you can teach your children to read and understand the King James Version, we should probably first discuss why you should want to do so.

If you are an English speaker, even if you are an atheist you should want your child to be familiar with the great works in the history of the English Language, and the King James Version is certainly close to the top of the list, if not at the very top.

Even some of the greatest skeptics were of this opinion:

“It is the most beautiful of all translations of the Bible; indeed it is probably the most beautiful piece of writing in all the literature of the world.” -H. L. Mencken

“The translation was extraordinarily well done because to the translators what they were translating was not merely a curious collection of ancient books written by different authors in different stages of culture, but the Word of God divinely revealed through His chosen and expressly inspired scribes. In this conviction they carried out their work with boundless reverence and care and achieved a beautifully artistic result.” –George Bernard Shaw

"It is written in the noblest and purest English, and abounds in exquisite beauties of mere literary form." -Aldous Huxley

The influence of the King James Version on the English language has been huge, and there aren't many other texts that would be comparable in that regard.

For many centuries, even poorly educated people read and understood the King James Bible, because they made the effort to do so. For the most part, the King James Version is perfectly understandable for a modern reader. There are perhaps a hundred words or so that one would have to acquaint themselves with, if they were not already familiar with them. All of these words are found in a standard dictionary, and the intended meaning of the word in question will usually be listed as the primary or secondary meaning. There are also some handy guides online and in print that provide quick definitions with these words. And you could always look up a difficult text in the New King James Version, for clarification.

How?

First off, you have to teach them how to read, and teach them to love reading.

My wife and I home schooled our children, and the single best text we used was a book entitled "Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons," by Siegfried Engelmann. It provides a parent with simple and clear instructions as to how to use the text, and it effectively teaches a child how to read phonetically, and also how to understand the many quirks we have in English spelling (something that is often not taught in public schools in our times). Most importantly, it works. I started teaching both of my children how to read with this text when they were three, and had them reading on a basic level within a few months.

The first books I had my children read were in a series of Bible story booklets from Concordia Press that are designed for beginning readers -- the closest thing that they have to what we used in print now is in a series called "Hear Me Read.".

As they got a bit older, I read them a comic book collection of Bible Stories (The Picture Bible), and as their reading improved, they would read it on their own. This gave them an overall understanding of the Bible in broad strokes, and helped to improve their own reading.

In addition to reading books directly connected to the Bible, reading other classic texts to your children helps to develop a love for reading.

We did not have our children read much of Shakespeare, because Shakespeare's plays were not meant to be read -- they were meant to be watched. We had them watch all of his major plays -- some in multiple versions, and they enjoyed them. And this helped to familiarize them with Elizabethan English, and in a way that was not at all tedious.

Finally, when their reading level got to the point that they could begin to do it, I had them read the Bible to me. This helped their reading and pronunciation, and it also gave me a chance to explain any words that were obscure, and to discuss the meaning of the text. We started with Genesis, and stuck to the narrative portions of the Law and the Historical books. We eventually brought in the Wisdom books, the prophets, and also the Gospels and Epistles.

A very important help to this whole process was to get an edition of the King James that had modern spelling, punctuation, and paragraphing -- and to have the same edition in everyone's hand, so we were literally all on the same page. At the time, we used the Third Millennium Bible, but what I would recommend now is using the Cambridge New Paragraph Bible with the "Apocrypha". This edition is laid out in a way that is much easier for contemporary readers, and the more I use it myself, the more I have come to like it.

One other thing I did was to have my children memorize the names and order of the books of the Bible, and then we would do something which I learned from Sunday School as a child -- "Sword drills". When we finished reading the Bible, I would call out random Scripture references, and we would see which child could find it first. This taught them how to navigate their way around the Bible.